The invention relates to an elevator arrangement for high-rise buildings, which arrangement comprises a number of elevators, which have different ranges of movement in the vertical direction, and they therefore travel in the vertical direction to different heights, and can thus serve different floors. These elevators are in this context called zoned elevators. For feeding passengers to these types of elevators, there can also be a feeder elevator in use, which in this context is called a lobby elevator. A lobby elevator can efficiently feed passengers to the aforementioned zoned elevators, stopping only at some of the floors of the zoned elevators (in this context so-called “lobby floors”), from which lobby floors the passengers can continue to their destination floors with zoned elevators, which stop frequently. There are also other feeder methods. For example, when the arrangement is implemented without a separate feeder elevator, a passenger can climb to higher in the building using a number of zoned elevators consecutively. This, however, is an extremely slow elevator arrangement that is problematic from the viewpoint of peak traffic periods. In elevator arrangements according to prior art that comprise a number of elevators, one problem is that the construction phase decisions of the building developer and the decisions made on the basis of the needs of initial users concerning the layout of the elevators of the elevator arrangement are often not optimal from the viewpoint of later users of the building. If the owner/tenant of the premises of the building, or the intended usage of the building, later changes, the user traffic can change. Likewise, if the vertical size or user volume of company premises changes, a need can arise to transport people between such floors that originally had no elevator connection. User traffic can also change for other reasons. The service lives of buildings are long, and in practice an elevator arrangement is changed only when an old elevator is modernized and a new elevator arrangement with new elevators is installed. It has been uneconomic to use a building and its elevator arrangement for a long time in a manner that is clearly non-optimal. Taking the preceding into account, there is a need for a more flexible elevator arrangement than before.
Yet another problem noticed in elevators according to prior art is that the machine rooms of elevators have been formed to be large, and the bottom limit of the range of movement of the upper elevator of consecutive zoned elevators operating one above another has been at a distance from the top limit of the range of movement of the lower elevator. These reasons have resulted in the space usage of a building having an efficiency that could be improved with respect to an elevator arrangement. From the viewpoint of design freedom, it has been detrimental that the need to serve some floor has necessitated adjusting a zoned elevator system in a zigzag fashion alternately in adjacent hoistways.